THUNDERCLAP

Jump to Comments

Evolution

Jon Miller, my partner at Velocity, has been offered one of only a small handful of jobs in Digital Media that touches every corner of the globe, within News Corp.   It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to shape a vast and powerful digital domain and the opportunity may be too good to pass up.

Jon has been both a friend for many years and a business partner since we both exited our jobs at AOL and Fox in late 2006.  We’ve had a fascinating ride since then, traveling the world, learning things about the investing world we couldn’t have learned in big corporate jobs or start-ups.  We both share the desire to learn, and learn we did.   While a decision to move on from Velocity would end our formal partnership together, it wouldn’t end our work together or our friendship.  Our experiences will last us a lifetime, and our work over the past two years goes on.

While Jon would get to travel the world helping News Corp grow its digital businesses globally (hopefully on the corporate jet!), Velocity will continue.  Along with our partners Keyur Patel, Roland Van der Meer and David Britts, we’ve made some really exciting investments, hired some very talented people and believe that the thesis, by which we have invested over the past 16 months since forming Velocity, will hold true.
Allow me to crow a bit about our time together.  We’ve seen two exits from our investments, in CNET and Fabrik. Some other highlights:
•    Twine, the semantic web leader/bookmarking site is seeing massive growth. This year Twine’s unique visitors are growing at 55% month-over-month on average, page views have tripled, and registered users are growing at 70% on average per month
•    Generate, the production and management company headed by former WB CEO Jordan Levin has added more than 100 clients in the last year, and saw two of its shows get picked up as series last year on cable.
•    Next New Networks generated more than 300 million video views last year and in the last six months has seen 20 new advertisers sign on including big brands like Amex, Frito Lay, Unilever, Verizon, Lions Gate, Warner Brothers and Intel.
•    Broadband Enterprises is profitable and continues to lead in the online video advertising space reaching more than 100 million unique users every month.
•    Publish 2 is rapidly reshaping the news gathering business, has nearly 5000 professional journalists on its platform and since market launch in the fall of 2008, and in many ways has built the world’s largest newsroom
•    In India, NDTV continues to have record TV and Internet ratings in multiple categories, and recently received a $150m investment from NBC, and India TV is now the #1 Hindi news channel.  Fuse + Media, a next generation content studio has launched both online and offline product across all platforms, including having its first movie, starring Kate Bosworth picked up for distribution by a major US Studio!

•    Others like True/Slant and Crowd Fusion are emerging as unique differentiators in the publishing space and Fat Tail recently launched Page Gage, a sales optimization software solution for online publishers, with many beta partners and received the AlwaysOn OnMedia Top 100 Award for it.

•    Quantia Communications has a unique vision of digital communications and has built a platform integrating interactive rich media, social networks, mobile and the web.   They have focused exclusively in healthcare and have built a successful, thriving community for physicians.

•    And, Mixercast has become a leader in providing social marketing and social applications solutions, serving top tier media such as MTV Networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, etc  and advertisers such as McDonald’s. Nike, Levi’s, etc. The company’s flagship platform – the MCast suite, providers technology to quickly build, syndicate, optimize and track campaigns and content across all facets of the web including social networks and blogs

As for Jon, if he decides to take the big chair,  I’ll miss my friend and the day to day dreaming we did about the future of the media business.  News Corp would benefit from Jon’s vision, skills and integrity.  It would be a new beginning for him and Velocity too.  We’re in the midst of some exciting moves and deals that will lead to more interesting adventures for all of us.

7 Comments

Filed under Media